The medical elite in France in the early nineteenth century.

Abstract

One of the recurring themes in the work of Joseph Ben-David was the influence of institutional patterns on scientific and educational activities. He focused primarily on formal administrative properties like centralisation and decentralisation; but he also examined the relationship of groups to the scientific reward system with a view to explaining the conditions for innovation. In my current research on the French medical elite, I am very much following a line of inquiry pioneered by Professor Ben-David. To be sure, medicine is a particularly complex sphere of activity which includes scientific research, professional education, political authority and a great deal more besides. This complexity has led me away from concern with general forms of administrative procedure, and towards methods of discovering the relationship between the different sub-sectors of medicine, and between these and non-medical institutions. My goal is to describe the actual distribution of positions, prestige and power. In this paper, the focus of attention is the elite of the French medical profession in the early part of the nineteenth century as represented by the membership of the influential Academie de medecine.